Age of the Empireschinese Art of the Qin and Han Dynasties
Art Review
'Age of Empires': How 2 Dynasties of Art Forged China's Identity
No one does epic better than the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Information technology brought Pergamon to New York last spring and got the balance of giant and delicate right. Information technology flew in medieval Jerusalem, and kept its multicultural sprawl intact. At present, in the exhibition "Age of Empires: Chinese Art of the Qin and Han Dynasties (221 B.C.-A.D. 220)," it brings us China condign China in a big-picture take as strange and warm equally life.
We dear life, of course, all the details: sparrows in the forsythia; books and lamps and late-night coffee; the voice of a friend on the phone. The aboriginal Chinese loved information technology, likewise, and wanted it to terminal forever. China's first emperor believed it might.
He viewed death as a kind of power nap, from which he'd awake refreshed in a tomb that was similar an earthly abode, merely better, more fun. He designed his mausoleum as an underground Mar-a-Lago, with countless pavilions, great feng shui and a major security force. For light, there were candles, the well-nigh expensive coin could purchase, guaranteed to keep burning after he'd moved in — he died in 210 B.C. — and the doors had shut for the last time.
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Those lights are still burning in the Met's hypnotic, glow-in-the-dark exhibition of 160 objects from 32 museums in Cathay, which opens on Mon. Of the museum's several presentations of Chinese antiquities over the past 20 years, this ane is probably the most dramatic visually and the nearly accessible emotionally. At that place's a certain amount of the type of art the Met is too comfy with: purple bling. Just hither fifty-fifty this material feels purposeful, because information technology dates from a time in People's republic of china when the idea of empire and corporate branding through art was experimental.
Past the third century B.C., the long-lived Zhou dynasty had run its class, and turf wars broke out amidst smaller regional states. One of those states, the kingdom of Qin (pronounced Mentum), overcame all rivals and brought much of Mainland china nether one rule for the get-go fourth dimension. It did this partly through armed strength, but also through a sort of direction savvy taught in business schools today.
The Qin ruler, born Ying Zheng, decided that the nearly effective means of control was to promote team spirit: Get everyone on the aforementioned civic page, and keep them at that place. To that end, he instituted a unified currency and a unmarried standard of weights and measures. He decreed the use of a universal written script, which let him control the political chat. And he initiated construction of the Slap-up Wall, a brick-and-mortar statement of U.s.a. versus Them.
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The effect of all this was to create a rudimentary sense of shared identity inside a various population; a sense of Qin-ness or — to use a modern English word that may derive from Qin — Chinese-ness.
The M.B.A. thinking worked, or did for Ying Zheng himself. He became the first Chinese ruler to assume the sky-kissed championship of emperor — Qin Shihuangdi, or First Emperor of Qin — and congenital a tomb near Xian, in northwestern People's republic of china, to lucifer its grandeur. We have only written accounts of what'south in the tomb (the pavilions, the candles; information technology'southward never been excavated). But its presence yielded one of the late-20th-century's great art historical finds when, in 1978, on a tip from local farmers, archaeologists uncovered an army of some 7,000 life-size terra-cotta figures buried nearby.
V of those figures, four continuing, ane kneeling, open up the Met show (along with ii modernistic reproductions of buried chariots found with them). They, or their like, accept been endlessly circulated for display, but they're all the same magnetic, with their blocklike bodies and personable faces, mold-bandage and customized. Even more striking, and less familiar, is another figure institute in a unlike part of the tomb site, this 1 a beefy court entertainer, nude to the waist, with every fold of flesh and smashing of muscle precisely rendered.
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In that location was no precedent in China for any of this, the scale, the naturalism. Then what was the source? Historians point to a likely one: the Hellenistic art that was introduced by Alexander the Bang-up to Asia — at Pergamon, for example — and filtered over trade routes to China. Whatever its origins, the new sculpture adds some other facet to the profile of Qin-ness: cosmopolitan sense of taste.
But for all its innovations, or mayhap because of them, Qin dominion was brief, fifteen years. The emperor spent a lot of time on the road, surveying his domain only also on a quest for life-extending elixirs. His sudden decease unleashed an opera-worthy drama of assassinations, suicides and ceremonious war, until some other imperial power, called Han, took its place, and held it more than than iv centuries.
Han artists congenital on Qin precedents in art, merely with adjustments. For a while they maintained an involvement in realism, but seemed to shift the emphasis from the homo figure to the natural world. The large personalities in Han sculpture in the show are animals: horses as royal as gods; elephants, strange to Communist china, closely observed. Fifty-fifty common barnyard creatures — chickens, goats and pigs — are portrayed with empathy; you can almost hear them clucking and snuffling.
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The Han farther refined the policy of centralized imperial rule and expanded its reach outward, globally, evident in the steady increase in material richness and variety seen equally you move through the bear witness, by granulated gold work, amethyst necklaces and luxury textiles brought overland and by sea from Afghanistan, Republic of india, Persia, nomadic Eurasia and the Mediterranean.
Some of the most exotic items are from People's republic of china itself. An middle-stopping, fantastically sophisticated statuary cowrie shell container, swarming with tiny figures in what looks like a raucous Bruegelesque market scene, was produced by the Dian culture in what is at present Yunnan province, people that Han court records referred to as "southwestern barbarians."
Was that imperialism or provincialism speaking? They can be the same thing. And they can as motivate people to shape an exclusive grouping identity. The Han were intent on doing so, though this didn't forestall them from borrowing heavily from other cultures, including their firsthand predecessors.
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As with the Qin, Han society, at least at elite levels, focused on the future. Most items in the Met show came from graves. Many objects were specifically for funerary use. Like much fine art everywhere, the underlying inspiration was political and personal. Fine art promoted and shored up the hierarchies on which a civilisation was built. Information technology also answered to a homo need to keep life going.
The Han aristocracy spared no expense to ensure their constancy. The survivors of a Han princess named Dou Wan encased her corpse in a jumpsuit fabricated from ii,000 jade plaques linked with gilt threads, jade being a rock thought to take preservative properties. The suit is in the evidence, and as we approach through a passageway in Zoe Florence's theatrical exhibition installation, information technology looks similar a sleeping extraterrestrial, a space traveler patiently waiting to be beamed up.
Yet everything in the surrounding galleries seems designed to anchor the traveler to life on earth: a fiddling hand-warmer in the form of a carved jade bear; a silk pillow woven with the words "extend years"; a vogueing earthenware dancer with ankle-length sleeves; and a jeroboam-size wine jar that, when discovered in 2003, all the same held Han wine. There's even a luxury loftier-rising, or a model of one, and lamps to light it, including ane shaped like a tree sprouting ducks and dragons like spring buds.
At the end of the evidence — organized by Zhixin Jason Sun, a curator of Chinese fine art at the Met, assisted past Pengliang Lu, a curatorial boyfriend — in that location's a low airtight door, carved from stone, fabricated for a tomb, and painted with figures that could be earthly or angelic. If you passed through the door, which life would you lot be inbound, or leaving, and is at that place a preference?
An answer may lie in an object hanging on the exhibition's exit wall. It'southward a round gilt-bronze mirror with an inscription embossed on its rim: "May the Central Kingdom exist peaceful and secure, and prosper for generations and generations to come, by following the great law that governs all." Key Kingdom meant Prc. And for the Qin and the Han, wherever you went, in this earth or the next, you lot were in that location.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/arts/design/review-age-of-empires-chinese-art-the-met-museum.html
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